Men still want to make dough, not bake it

Novelist Joanna Trollope is wrong to think that men are happy to let women be
the breadwinner in the family, says stay-at-home father Grant Feller

Daddy day-care: many people have doubts about stay-at-home fathers

By Grant Feller

2:59PM BST 07 Apr 2014

I celebrated a depressingly monumental birthday at the weekend. Not the number of years but the method of payment. As normal, my wife and I enjoyed our twice-yearly Michelin-starred evening – but, for the first time ever, it all went on her credit card.

It's not that I didn't have the £300 or so hiding in the darkest corners of my account. It's just that, well, she now earns more. After a rather torrid turn of events, I've begun to reinvent myself (and career), which leaves me with good weeks and bad ones, golden months and occasional leaden ones.

The woman for whom I once sacrificed 14 hours a day trying to keep in the style in which she had become accustomed, now wears the more elegant purse-strings – and oh how they suit her. In truth she makes for a far more convincing executive than I ever did. It's the killer heels; they never suited me.

Speaking at the Cambridge Literary Festival, the 70-year-old Aga-saga author said: "The statistic is that above 25 per cent of working women in the UK out-earn men they live with. If you look at 18 to 40-year-olds that increases to 33 per cent. I think there’s an enormous amount of men who want to look after their children now.

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"I interviewed men in their 30s and early 40s about it and I was interested to see how many men said 'actually I was absolutely thankful to stop working, I didn’t really like it'. And that’s making history."

Sorry Joanna, but what it is making is a generation of deeply confused, emasculated, insecure and bewildered men. We're encouraged from an absurdly young age to unleash naked ambition and settle into a life of providing – yet we're no longer assured of being the number one earner, and we're now expected to be as adept at making a killing as we are at making a cake. But in the eyes of men who have been raised on the idea of the bread winner, baking dough is no substitute for making it.

The war of the sexes is becoming ever more brutal, no matter what Trollope's interviewees have told her. Those of us being out-earned by our wives – it's known as being purse-whipped, even more insulting than pussy-whipped – may be willing to accept the situation, but that doesn't mean we're happy about it.

The strains of competitive marriage syndrome ought to be obvious to Trollop, who admits that her second marriage collapsed just as her career took off and his plateaued. It's a common story in marriages where the woman becomes the financial boss as well as the domestic one. Increasing gender equality is a good and necessary thing – but that doesn't mean it's easy for men to adapt. After centuries of being told to be top dog, men often struggle to reconcile their masculinity with the idea of being 'kept'.

'Kept man' is such a dreadful phrase. Kept from what? Kept from being who we are, I'd venture. Rather worryingly, a recent study in Denmark concluded that men whose partners out-earned them “were more likely to take medication for erectile dysfunction.” So we're even kept from the one thing we actually enjoy.

The emergence of my wife's credit card left an unpleasant aftertaste, brought on, I suspect, by a sudden tsunami of testosterone (I had just devoured undressed crab and bleu steak, simply to make a pathetic point) and months of kissing her goodbye at the front door before hurrying the children to school, planning dinner, firing off a few emails and filling my days with 'important' meetings and cups of coffee.

So Joanna, if you really want to know how 'happy' the poorer sex feel, pop over to West London sometime. We can have lunch in the local pub – you're buying. I'll tell you my story but please don't flinch when I cry into my beer. You can turn it into a lager saga.